Sawmills

[Nelphine]

Agreed. Overall, no need to change, as the AI had an advantage, and the human had the bigger potential of a bad start. Now the human doesn't have as bad a chance, and the AI doesn't have as big an advantage, but the AI got a slight advantage on what was taught to compensate.

So I still stand by not changing AI start.

(Also, I like the concept of making more AI building choices based on personality, if that's still a thing. It was just minor compared to he rest of these discussions.)

[Seravy]

It's possible but I think doing that would not really benefit the AI, if you mean the "library first" I mentioned.

In theory libraries produce as much research as magic markets or marketplaces other resources so it wouldn't be a worse buy but in practice it's a lot worse because research can't be reinvested to snowball, and having an additional common spell contributes almost zero to the AI (unless they are under attack from the human) - those that do contribute the AI picks as starting spell 90% of the time.

(assuming it's a 20 turns time period while the AI builds the mandatory stuff, a library would give them 120 RP, so two of them plus the AI bonus would be a single common spell. Not that great...
Even on low difficulty where they waste 40 turns, with no difficulty bonus on research it's only one and a half common ahead...and low difficulty is exactly where we don't want the AI to have good combat spells to fight the human early.)

(magic markets make mana, which pays for creatures, helping the AI avoid the "hey I'm a spellweaver so I summoned 25 nagas, wait now I can't use combat spells anymore becomes income<skill+maintenance" problem and eventually raise skill or just make sure they can cast spells in battle. A lot more relevant than researching an extra spell, although unless Alchemist, mana also won't directly snowball but excess raises casting skill which will by casting more creatures or economy spells)

[Nelphine]

It's more that, while the first 2 or 3 cities, those things are relevant, in the later game, the snowball effect isn't the point.

So even if it was something like 'past turn 50' then personality determined it, that would be interesting. Not a huge deal, so I'm not worried if it doesn't happen, but I like anything that differentiates personalities.

[Seravy]

Done adding the easy lairs.
Each has 50-150 monster budget. Treasure is a minimum of 100, so that is in the range of 100-150 instead.
Each is in a range of 7 from the player's starting city.

We might want to reconsider the higher limit as too low means less treasure but too high means harder lairs (or higher tier monsters).

These are the relevant monster costs :
Skeletons 20 (so you can have up to 7 of these!)
Zombies 40
Phantom Warriors 40
Guardian spirit 50
Fire Elemental 55
Hell Hounds 60
War Bears 70
Ghouls 80
Sprites 80
Phantom Beast 125
Gargoyles 140
Werewolves 140
Giant Spiders 150

So you can only have at most one of Ghouls and below if the max budget is 150, up to 2 bears, hounds or elementals, and 3 or more of the weaker stuff. Raising the budget would allow 2 ghouls, 2 sprites, or even spiders.

Number of normal weak lairs changes to 17+2*Land Size from 15+3*Land Size to make the needed 3 free space in the array on Huge. I hope the extra 2 on Tiny isn't a large enough change to cause freezing.

Do note this means the player might find up 100 treasure for defeating a monster worth only 50.

Also, I can't help thinking this makes Sprites an ever more powerful strategy, as almost all of these are compatible. Not that an extra 300-400 gold makes a big difference on Sprites games, where you often crack 1k+ lairs with them.

btw these have an interesting consequence. If you don't clear them out by turn 40, you have a higher than usual chance for rampaging monsters to spawn near you since there are more lairs around you.

[Nelphine]

I never considered this but are skeletons really that much worse than phantom warriors? I mean in a lair. Particularly as the easiest lair hunting uses ranged units.

I'd be tempted to move skeletons up to 40.

No nagas on the list? They aren't that expensive surely?

Offhand I'd be tempted to raise the max to 160, but reducing to 140 may also be a good idea to avoid spiders. Heck even 130? Gargoyles and werewolves both require at least some thought so don't really qualify as ultra easy.

I'm not concerned that sprites get stronger. Sprites don't do anything other than hunt treasure anyway, and they require starting picks, so they really should do something relatively major. You give up, for instance, being dark elves to get sprites (assuming you're already taking a nature book); or you give up another nature spell if taking heavy nature (this is almost the only time sprites can be considered) or you give up spellweaver if not taking any nature for any other reason.

[Seravy]

They aren't, but the numbers are set considering what else is available in the realm to have proper spacing between the numbers. Changing them without a very good reason is not an option.

And exactly for this, Nagas are that expensive (170). You don't need to worry about spiders, you'd need to roll a 100 on your D100 to have exactly 150 budget and then you'd need to roll the spider. Werewolves and Gargoyles are a pain indeed, so 130 might make sense. However then we won't find more than 130 money in them either.
At first I tried 200 but with that you even get Unicorns.

[Nelphine]

Crazy that nagas are above werewolves and gargoyles.
How bout 180?

[Seravy]

180 allows nagas, but also has a fairly good chance for 1 spider, allows 2 ghouls, 2 sprites, and even 9 skeletons or 3 bears. No unicorns or night stalkers (those are 200) but still a bit on the "too hard" side. I rather keep them at 150 or reduce to 130. Probably an occasional 1 werewolf is safe (you can still kill that with bears or nagas or whatnot, you just need like two and a combat spell), gargoyles is a pain though. Nothing you can produce early beats those in a reliable way. But there are three of them for a reason, having one of them bad once in 10 games is acceptable.

[teelaurila]

I think this will be an improvement. Still wanted to chip in about what I think is the only early alternative to sawmills: early heroes. Heroes are a gamble but some early luck needed is to me a sign of correct difficulty. So we might consider substantially increasing hero recruit chances with 0 (or even 1 and 2) heroes. So that one could even somewhat pick and choose the first hero(es). But more importantly stashing gold for a hero becomes more reliable. It's far more interesting to adapt to play with the hero(es) and items you get than always the same cities.

[Nelphine]

I agree. Problem is that heroes are very difficult to balance - someone who goes for lots of stacked defense wins. Someone who simply uses a hero as extra with whatever items happen to be found (with no multiple defense items) is lots of fun.

Defense in this case isn't just armor, it's all of the different things including agility, divine protection, and tactician.

Heroes have definitely got better, but at the same time, my crazy 5 way life alliance gane, I've only had one hero offer - and it's 1418. So heroes have also gotten much rarer in some ways.

I'd suggest doing it in a different thread (there's almost certainly some old ones discussing the change to famous in depth) and seeing if anything new can be done for Heroes.